MiT3: television in transition

Speakers

Lanfranco Aceti is a researcher at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. He collaborates with the Imperial College and his research focuses on the avant-garde in digital media, interactivity and intelligent systems.

Jiwon Ahn is a doctoral candidate at the Division of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema-Television, University of Southern California. She is currently teaching a course on mass media and global communication at New York University.

Aida Aidakyeva is a graduate student in the School of Telecommunications, Ohio University, and a recipient of a Muskie Scholarship awarded to students from former Soviet Union countries.

Lily Alexander directs a project on the representation of violence on screen at the University of Toronto and teaches film, visual studies and cultural theory in the School of Image Arts at Rykerson University.

Michela Ardizzoni is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. She is currently conducting research on the impact of globalization and transnationalism on Italian media.

Jane Arthurs is a principal lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the West of England, where her research interests include the ways that gender and sexuality impinge on the production, textual characteristics and reception of film and television.

Thom Baggerman is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests include television news, media technology and digital television.

Olga Guedes Bailey is a senior lecturuer in the School of Media, Critical and Creative Arts at Liverpool John Moores University.

Doris Baltruschat has extensive experience in the production and distribution of international film and television programs. She is also a Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University. Her research foci include: globalization and culture, international film and TV co-productions and media literacy.

Christine Becker is an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, where she specializes in film and television history.

Mary C. Beltrán recently received a Ph.D degree in radio-television-film at the University of Texas, Austin, where her dissertation examined the impact of sociopolitical and industry developments on the construction and marketing of Latina film stars since the 1920s, with a focus on the "crossover" stardom of contemporary Latina celebrities.

Jose Luis Benitez is a doctoral student in mass communication at Ohio University.

Anita Biressi is senior lecturer in cultural and media studies at the University of Surrey, where she teaches courses in crime and the media, popular journalism and news culture.

Jim Bizzocchi is an assistant professor of interactive arts at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is active in educational technology, is the past president of the Canadian Association for Distance Education, and he did his graduate work in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies.

Mats Bjorkin, is associate professor in cinema studies at the Department of Musicology and Film Studies, Goteborg University, Sweden. He is working on a book on television and commercial culture in Sweden during the 1950s, focusing on industrial media (film, photo, exhibition etc) in relation to television.

Aniko Bodroghkozy is an assistant professor in the media studies program and English department at the University of Virginia. Her book Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion was published in 2001 by Duke University Press.

Kristina Borjesson is an independent broadcast producer who has worked for most of the major networks, including CBS and CNN. She is the editor and a contributed to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free.

Kahlil Byrd is a graduate student at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he is concentrating on international media. Until summer 2002, Kahlil was a producer for THE WORLD, an international affairs public radio program co-produced by WGBH Public Broadcasting in Boston and The British Broadcasting Corporation.

Donal Carbaugh is professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is chair of the International Communication Association's Language and Social Interaction Division.

James Carey is CBS Professor of International Journalism in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and Adjunct Professor at Union Theological Seminary. He is the author of Television and the Press and Communication As Culture and numerous reviews, essays and monographs. He was dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1979 to 1992.

Rod Carveth is associate professor of communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He is author of Media Economics: Theory and Practice, the forthcoming book Navigating the Network Society: The Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Age, and several articles and papers on the digital divide.

Shira Chess is a graduate student studying media theory at Emerson College, and a professional Web developer.

Bertha Chin is a Ph.D. student in Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is researching the online fan communities and fan fiction industry of The X-Files. Her research interests include television, fandom, fan social hierarchy, fan identity and identification as well as Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Russell Connor is an artist/writer who has been engaged since 1963 in the writing and production of television programs about the arts. In 1970, he curated the world's first museum exhibition of video art, called Vision and Television, at Brandeis University. He has written and hosted a number of television shows about art including the WGBH series Museum Open House from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; a series for HBO called The Artist's Eye; and a series for WNET in New York, entitled VTR: Video and Television Review. His monograph, Pierre Soulages: Light in the Dark, will be published by Alvik Editions in Paris in 2003.

Nick Couldry teaches media and cultural sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Place of Media Power (2000) and Inside Culture (2000). His research interests include media rituals, media and citizenship, and alternative media.

Lisa M. Cuklanz is associate professor of communication and director of women’s studies at Boston College, and is co-chair of the board of directors of the Radcliffe Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies.

Marie Curkin-Flanagan is an assistant professor in the School of Mass Communications, University of South Florida.

Hugh Curnutt is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication department at The University of Pittsburgh.

Joe Cutbirth is a doctoral student in communications at Columbia University, where he studies how the presidency is portrayed in prime-time television drama and late-night television comedy, and the impact that has on public opinion and historical perceptions of the presidency and specific presidents.

Stephanie Davenport is a graduate student in MIT Comparative Media Studies with a background in corporate sponsorships and media relations. Her interests include telepresence and wireless art projects, artist/researcher collaborations, and new media art-funding models.

Maire Messenger Davies is the author of ‘Dear BBC’: Children, Television, Storytelling and the Public Sphere.

Christine Daymon is a senior lecturer at Bournemouth Media School, Bournemouth University, where her research focuses on the management of organizations in the creative sector (notably television and public relations).

June Deery is an associate professor of literature and media studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

John Dimling is the chairman of Nielsen Media Research, where he previously served as president. Dimling joined Nielsen Media Research in 1985 as group director of planning and development. In 1986, he was appointed senior vice president, director of marketing for the Nielsen Television Index (NTI), and in 1988 he was named executive vice president, group director of marketing, Nielsen Media Research. In 1993, he became president and chief operating officer, Nielsen Media Research, and in July 1998 he was elected president and chief executive officer.

John Downing is John T. Jones, Jr., Centennial Professor of Communication in the Radio-Television-Film Department of The University of Texas at Austin. His books Vicious Circle (1968 written with W.D. Wood) and Now You Do Know, (1980) focused on racism in Britain, and The Media Machine (1980) addressed issues of class, race and gender in British mass media. Downing is chief editor of the Encyclopedia of Alternative Media (forthcoming 2004).

Nabil Echchaibi is a doctoral student in mass communication at Indiana University.

Elizabeth Ellsworth is the Julius and Rosa Sachs Distinguished 2002-2003 Lecturer in the Department of Arts and Humanities, Teachers College, Columbia University, and a member of the media studies faculty at New School University.

Michael Epstein is a graduate student in Comparative Media at MIT.

Charles Ferris, a member of the Washington law firm Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Popeo, was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission from October 1977 until April 1981. Under his administration, the FCC established many of the policies followed today in telecommunications services, cable and broadcast television. Ferris is co-author of Cable Television Law: A Video Communications Practice Guide, a three-volume legal treatise dealing with new communications technologies.

Heather E. Fisher is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, and an editor for the Boston- and New York City-based literary magazine, Post Road.

Don Flournoy is professor in the School of Telecommunications and director of the Institute for Telecommunications Studies at Ohio University.

Murray Forman is a professor in the Departmernt of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan Press), and is currently working on a manuscript analyzing popular music on television before Elvis (1948-1955).

Robin Foster is director of strategy, economics and finance at the Independent Television Commission - the UK's television regulator - and a senior research fellow at Bournemouth Media School.

Lawrence Fouraker is an assistant professor in history at St. John Fisher College.

Eric Freedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Florida Atlantic University. He is currently at work on a manuscript on the aesthetics and politics of public-access cable television, excerpts of which are included in The Television Studies Book (Arnold) and the journal Television and New Media (Sage).

Elfriede Fürsich is assistant professor of communication at Boston College. Her research areas include media globalization, journalism and media criticism. Some of her recent work examines nonfiction entertainment as a new global television genre.

Yair Galily teaches at the Zinman College of Physical Education and Sports Sciences at the Wingate Institute and coaches the Tel Aviv University women's basketball team.

Cristobal Garcia is a Fulbright Fellow in the MIT Comparative Media Studies program.

Christine Geraghty is professor of film and television studies at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, Scotland. She is the author of Women and Soap Opera (1991) and of British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the 'New Look' (2000) and co-editor of The Television Studies Book (1998).

Joan Giglione is a lecturer at the California State University, Fullerton, wher she teaches business writing and advanced business communication. Previously, Giglione worked as an entertainment CPA at entertainment companies, mainly in the children's television genre.

Hilaria Goessmann is a professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Trier.

Richard Gonci is senior creative director and media group director for Neoscape Inc. of Cambridge, MA.

Jonathan Gray is a Ph.D. candidate in media and communication studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Mary Beth Haralovich teaches film and television at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is co-editor of Television, History and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays (1999) which contains her study of the cold war and civil rights in I Spy.

R. Harindranath teaches at The Open University, U.K, where he chairs the Master's Program in Cultural and Media Studies.

Mobina Hashmi is a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Timothy Havens is assistant professor of television studies in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Iowa. In 2002, he received a six-month research-only Senior Fulbright Fellowship to study foreign television acquisitions and programming in Hungary.

Alison Hearn is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, and research associate at the Centre for Policy Research in Science and Technology at Simon Fraser University. She is author with Liora Salte of Outside the Lines: Issues in Interdisciplinary Research (1996).

Matt Hills is the author of Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002) and is currently writing a book on horror and cultural theory called, The Pleasures of Horror.

Teresa Hoefert de Turégano is an assistant professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Patrica Holland is a freelance writer, lecturer and researcher, currently working in association with Bournemouth University on a comprehensive data base on the history of the ITV current affairs programme This Week. She is the author of several books including The Television Handbook (Routledge, 2000); and a forthcoming (I.B.Tauris, 2004) book on current-affairs television, The Angry Buzz.

Bjorn Ingvoldstad is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University's Department of Communication and Culture.

Sanginjon Jabborov is a journalist and researcher who has published more than 30 analytical and academic research articles on various international and legal aspects of the mass media. He is the author of Mass Media Law (Tashkent, 2000), and News Agencies: News Writing and Reporting (Tashkent, 2001).

Kajri Jain is an Australian Research Council (ARC) postdoctoral fellow at the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Melbourne, where she is participating in an ARC-funded research project on Television, Globalisation and Social Change in India in collaboration with Sanjay Srivastava and John Sinclair.

Henry Jenkins is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities and director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he writes a monthly column on media and culture, "Digital Renaissance," for Technology Review. He is the author of several books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (Routledge, 1992), and editor of The Children's Culture Reader (NYU, 1998).

Monika Jensen-Stevenson is an Emmy-Award winning producer for 60 Minutes who reported for CTV National News and Public Affairs in Canada. She is the co-author of Kiss the Boys Goodbye and author of Spite House: The Last Secret of the War in Vietnam. She is a contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

Keith Johnson is MIT Professor Emeritus whose teaching and research experience at MIT, consulting in the high-tech world, and interest in screenwriting come together in his plotting of realistic sci-tech scenarios. Johnson stepped down early from teaching at MIT to produce and direct his original screenplay for the science-mystery feature, Breaking Symmetry, as an independent film in the Boston-Cambridge area.

Liza Johnson is an assistant professor of art at Williams College. She co-curated Through Afghan Eyes: A Culture in Conflict, 1987-1992, an exhibition of footage from the AMRC archives shown at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2002.

Bernard Kalb is a veteran journalist and media critic who has worked for NBC News, CBS News, CNN and the New York Times.

Marvin Kalb is a senior fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and faculty chair for the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Washington programs. Kalb was the Shorenstein Center's founding director (1987-99). His distinguished journalism career encompasses 30 years of award-winning reporting for CBS and NBC News, as chief diplomatic correspondent, Moscow bureau chief, and host of Meet the Press. Kalb has authored or co-authored eight non-fiction books and two best-selling novels. His most recent book, One Scandalous Story, is a case-study of the Washington press corps's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, published by the Free Press in October, 2001.

Kathleen Rowe Karlyn teaches film studies at the University of Oregon. Her publications include The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter and articles on feminism, film and cultural studies, including a widely anthologized essay on Roseanne.

Theresse Kawarabayashi is a graduate student in the Harvard Business School and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Michael Keating is a visiting scholar in the MIT Media Studies group for the 2002-2003 academic year. Previously, he was a partner in the Media and Technology Practice with the Boston Consulting Group and served as a CIO and vice-president with Bertelsmann in both Paris and New York.

Kieran Kelly is a senior lecturer in cultural studies at the University of the West of England (Bristol), where he teaches about political economy and globalization. He is a co-author of New Media: A Critical Introduction (2003).

Philip S. Khoury is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and professor of history a tMIT. Professor Khoury is a political and social historian of the Middle East and a frequently invited media commentator on Middle Eastern affairs. Among his publications are Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism (Cambridge University Press); Syria and the French Mandate (Princeton University Press), which received the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association; Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (University of California Press); The Modern Middle East: A Reader (University of California Press); and Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-war Reconstruction (Brill). He is currently writing a book on war and society in the Middle East during World War II.

Griseldis Kirsch is a research fellow in the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Trier.

John Michael Kittross is editor of Media Ethics magazine and former editor of the Journal of Broadcasting. He is co-author of Stay Tuned: A History ofAmerican Broadcasting and Controversies in Media Ethics.

Stacey Lynn Koerner is senior vice president, director of broadcast research, for Initiative Media North America, where she is responsible for all television research and programming analysis. She has written extensively on these topics for agency, client and press distribution, is routinely quoted in consumer and trade media outlets, and appears regularly on CNN, CNBC and elsewhere to discuss trends in television programming.

Derek Kompare is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at Texas Christian University, where he teaches courses on media history, media analysis, popular music, and technology and culture. He has published and presented several articles on the aging of popular media texts, and is preparing a book on the history of rerun syndication on American television.

Marwan M. Kraidy teaches global communication and culture in the Division of International Communication, School of International Service, American University. He is co-editor of Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (forthcoming), and is completing a book on global media and cultural hybridity.

Susan B. Kretchmer, Johns Hopkins University and Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide, is the author of numerous papers, articles, and book chapters on information and communication technology issues and the forthcoming book, Navigating the Network Society: The Challenges and Opportunities of the Digital Age.

Giselinde Kuipers is assistant professor at the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and is currently spending a year at the University of Pennsylvania on a grant from the talent program of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Yves Laberge is an associate member at the Institut québécois des hautes études internationales (Québec City).

Kurt Lancaster is an assistant professor at Fort Lewis College. He is the creator of the video-streaming Web narrative, Letters from Orion (www.lettersfromorion.com) and the co-author (with Cynthia Conti) of Building a Home Movie Studio and Getting Your Films Online (Billboard Books, 2001).

Lori Landay is an assistant professor in the Department of General Education at Berklee College of Music. Her book, Madcaps, Screwballs and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), examines the cultural phenomena surrounding the popularity of comic heroines in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, silent and sound film between the wars, pos-twar television, and contemporary visual culture.

Antonio C. La Pastina is an assistant professor in the Speech Communication Department at Texas A&M University. Before moving to the United States in the late 1980s, he worked as a journalist in São Paulo, Brazil, his native country.

Christine Leishman is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Julia Lesage is a professor of English at the University of Oregon.

Michael Leslie is associate professor in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, where he teaches graduate courses and conducts cross-cultural research on the impact of modern communications technologies on society.

Elana Levine is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Michael Levine is a 25-year DEA-agent-turned-journalist who has consulted for and appeared on several television shows including 60 Minutes, Crossfire, and the MacNeil Lehrer NewsHour. He is the author of two best-selling books on his experiences in undercover and intelligence operations, Deep Cover and The Big White Lie. He is a contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

Amanda D. Lotz is an assistant professor of communication at Denison University, where she teaches courses on critical media analysis and critical institutional study.

Mark Lloyd is the Martin Luther King Visiting Professor at MIT and is the executive director of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy where he works with leaders in the civil rights and public interest community to influence federal, state, and local communications policy.

Lars Lundsten is head of the Department of Media at Arcada University, Esbo, Finland.

Soha Maad is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Media Communication (IMK) in Germany.

Daniel Mackay is a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, where he studies the historical development of fantasy and theorizes about changing conceptions of the imagination in literature.

Michele Malach is professor of media studies in the Department of English at Fort Lewis College.

Atteqa Malik is a freelance digital and textile artist based in Karachi, Pakistan.

Ramez Maluf is chairman of the Arts & Communication Division at the Lebanese American University and director of the Beirut Institute for Media Arts (BIMA). A journalist for nearly 20 years, Maluf is co-author of Beirut Reborn (1996).

Jennifer Mandel is a Ph.D. student in the history program at the University of New Hampshire.

P. David Marshall is chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, the author of Celebrity and Power (1997), and co-author of Web Theory (Routledge, 2003) and Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia (Cambridge, 2002)). Marshall was the founder of m/c: a journal of media and culture.

Ghen Maynard is vice president of alternative programming at CBS.

Michael L. Maynard is associate professor of advertising in the School of Communications and Theater at Temple University, where his areas of research include mass media analysis, the relationship between mass communication and culture as well as textual analyses of television and print advertising in Japan.

Anna McCarthy teaches in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. She is the author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (2001).

Christian McCrea is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne, where his thesis examines the deployment and consumption of narrative, celebrity, desire and success in computer games.

John McMurria is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. In addition to anthology and encyclopedia articles, he is co-author, with Toby Miller, Nitin Govil and Richard Maxwell of Global Hollywood (British Film Institute, 2001).

Toby Miller is professor of cultural studies and cultural policy in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author and editor of twenty-one books including Television Studies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2003, 5 volumes, editor), Television Studies (British Film Institute/ University of California Press, 2002, editor, associate editor Andrew Lockett); The Television Genre Book (British Film Institute/ Indiana University Press, 2001, associate editor with John Tulloch, editor Glen Creeber); Contemporary Australian Television (University of New South Wales Press, 1994, with Stuart Cunningham); and The Avengers (British Film Institute, 1997/Indiana University Press, 1998). Miller's work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish.

Jason Mittell is an assistant professor of American civilization and film & media culture at Middlebury College. He is currently working on a book on television genres as cultural categories.

Douglas Morgenstern teaches Spanish at MIT and works with digital video and online university exchanges.

Joanne Morreale is associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. She is the author of A New Beginning: A Textual Frame Analysis of the Political Campaign Film, The Presidential Campaign Film: A Critical History, and her most recent, Critiquing the Sitcom, an edited volume of essays on television sitcoms.

Bill Mosher is a journalist and the author of numerous short stories and novellas; the co-author of two books on local Massachusetts history; and the author of Visionaries, a companion book to The Visionaries television series.

Eggo Müller is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Re/presentation at the University of Utrecht.

Maurice Murad, a 38-year veteran of CBS News, has produced dozens of long-form documentaries and newsmagazine broadcasts for the network's top correspondents and programs including 60 Minutes and CBS Reports. He has won numerous awards for his work, including Emmys for film editing, writing, directing, producing and investigative journalism. He is a contributor to Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

Susan Murray is an assistant Professor of culture & communication at New York University, and a co-editor of Startling! Heartbreaking! Real!: Reality TV and the Re-making of Television Culture (NYU Press, 2003).

Siho Nam is a doctoral candidate in mass communications at the Pennsylvania State University. He is currently working on a translation (into Korean) of Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education by cultural studies scholar Henry Giroux.

Jonathan Nichols-Pethick teaches television and film courses at Depauw University.

Heather Nunn is program leader in journalism and communication studies at Middlesex University. Her research interests include gender politics, constructions of aberrant femininity and political culture. She is author of Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation (2003) and is currently completing a co-authored book on Reality TV.

Alice O'Driscoll is a graduate student in comparative media studies at MIT.

Tokunbo Ojo is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in the Montreal Gazette, several African publications and Web sites, the Journal of Cultural Studies, and Voices - the Wisconsin Review of African Literatures.

Esra Ozcan is a teaching and research assistant at Bahçesehir University, Istanbul, where she teaches a course named "Special Topics in Television," which focuses on socio-cultural aspects of television.

Laurie Ouellette teaches at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Viewers Like You? (2002).

Roberta Pearson is a reader in cultural and media studies at Cardiff University.

Henry Puente is a doctoral candidate in radio-television-film at the University of Texas, Austin. He has extensive entertainment industry experience, having worked or interned at Fine Line Features, FOX Television, Turner Entertainment, and the Writers Guild of America, West. Puente currently is based in Los Angeles as he writes his dissertation on how Hollywood has marketed Latino-themed films in the past 20 years.

Martin Roberts is a core faculty member at The New School who previously taught in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature and the film and media studies program at MIT.

MJ Robinson is a doctoral student in the media ecology program at New York University. This paper is drawn from research toward her dissertation: "Voice of the City: The WNYC TV/Film Unit, WNYC-TV and Municipal Broadcasting in New York City, 1947-1996."

Sharon M. Ross recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin in radio-television-film. Her dissertation looks at fan responses to the shows Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess from a feminist and queer perspective.

Gebhard Rusch is a privat dozent at Siegen University, Germany.

Sajan Saini is a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at MIT. His interests include fiction writing, stage-play directing and studying the mimetic dependence of narrative forms on their storytelling medium of choice.

Sherra Schick is a doctoral candidate in Indiana University's Department of Communication and Culture.

Seth Schulman joined the advertising firm Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, Inc in 2002 as the agency's first Cultural Interpreter, charged with making sense of trends in popular culture. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural history from Brown University.

Claudia Schwarz is a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

F. Scott Scribner is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Hartford, where he specializes in 19th and 20th century European philosophy, with a special emphasis on German Idealism, Critical Theory, and Media Theory.

Sangho Seo is a doctoral student at Penn. State University.

Simone Seym is a visiting researcher in the Communication, Culture and Technology Program at Georgetown University.

Jane Shattuc is an associate professor of visual and media arts at Emerson College.

Seema Shrikhande is assistant professor of communication at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. Her research interests are in media economics and international media. Her recent publications investigate competitive strategies of Asian satellite programmers.

Kathleen Sohar is a doctoral student at the University of Florida. In the early 1990s, Sohar worked at PanAmSat, the first independent international satellite provider.

Kristin Sorensen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.

Louisa Stein is a doctoral student in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University.

Bob Stepno is an assistant professor at Emerson College.

Susannah Stern teaches in the communication department at Boston College, where her research addresses adolescent Internet use, especially personal home pages.

David Thorburn is a professor of literature at MIT and director of the MIT Communications Forum. He is the author of Conrad’s Romanticism and many essays and reviews on literary, cultural and media topics. He is editor in chief of a forthcoming book series for the MIT Press titled Media in Transition.

Laura Tropp is an assistant professor at Marymount Manhattan College, where her research interests include studies on digital television, public service announcements, and voter mobilization efforts using media.

William Uricchio is a professor in the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited several books including The Many Lives of Batman (Routledge), Reframing Culture (Princeton), and The Nickel Madness (California), and is completing projects on the early Hollywood Western (Smithsonian), cyberhistory (BFI), and television in the Third Reich (Cambridge).

Tom Vreeland has been involved with electronic publishing, television, computing, and networks for 40 years. With the creation of the Mycast technology for the Web, he says he is bringing a new genre of television, and the next generation of 21st century video technology, to schools, teachers, and students.

Peter Walsh is chairman of the Massachusetts Art Commission, an art critic for WBUR Arts, the online arts pages of NPR station WBUR, and a contributing writer and editor for many publications.

Jing Wang is S.C. Fang professor of Chinese Language and Culture, and professor of Chinese cultural studies in the Foreign Languages and Literature department at MIT.

Amber Watts is a doctoral student at Northwestern University in the Department of Radio-Television-Film.

Christopher Weaver is president of Media Technology Ltd., a consulting firm specializing in media and electronic entertainment. Formerly, he was chief engineer to the House Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, vice president of Science & Technology for the National Cable Television Association and directed the office of Technology Forecasting for the American Broadcasting Company in New York.

Gilad Weingarten is director of sports media at the Zinman College for Physical Education and Sport Sciences at the Wingate Institute.

Jim Welch is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Southern California.

Michele White is a Mellon post-doctoral fellow at Wellesley College. Previously, she was an assistant professor at Bowling Green State University and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and member at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Magnus Widman is a doctoral student in the drama, theater and film program at Lund University, Sweden.

Winnie Wong is a research assistant of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the programming coordinator of the Art Interactive. She received her Master's degree from MIT in the history, theory and criticism of art and architecture.

Courtney Young is a graduate student at New York University.

Usha Zacharias is an assistant professor at Westfield State College (Massachusetts), where she teaches international communication, intercultural communication, media criticism, film and gender, and scriptwriting.

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